Dr. Yolanda López López, Rheumatologist & Writer

“It’s about an obstetrician who’s at the end of his professional career and is [sued for malpractice for the first time],” says Dr. López. “It deals with his issues and drama. There’s another story within this story, which is about his grandmother’s move from France during WWII to Puerto Rico. She’s his inspiration and gives him strength.” If you want to know the ending, you’ll have to buy the book, which was published in 2013 as an eBook on Amazon (https://tinyurl.com/y89z9kfz).

Her other novel is about a real-life event that happened in Puerto Rico in 1931. Although never prosecuted, a doctor claimed to have murdered a handful of patients. Writing this story, she says, demands a lot of online research and scouring the archives of the local newspapers.

“I searched the internet for music from the 1920s and 1930s,” she says. “While writing, I wear headphones listening to these songs. It’s like traveling back in time.”

Moving forward in time nearly a century, she is also tackling short biographies of famous black Puerto Ricans: Pura Belpré, who was the first Hispanic black employee at the New York Public Library, and Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, who’s known as the
father of American Negro history. Another story is about a fictitious young, black, slave girl who sneaks out of the master’s mansion to play with friends. (Puerto Rico did not ban slavery until 1873.)

“I’m a member of a study group called Cátedra de Mujeres Negras Ancestrales (Black Ancestral Females) that deals with the subject of [black people] and their contributions throughout history,” says Dr. López. “I really have done a lot of work with them. It’s been a wonderful experience.”

Click here to listen to Dr. López talk about how her writing.

She also plans to tell one more particular story: The tale of Hurricane Maria, which slammed into Puerto Rico on Sept 20, 2017, with 175 mph winds. For 30 straight days, Dr. López kept a diary and collected information about the U.S. government’s painfully slow response, as well as local response activity. She blames Hurricane Maria for her mother’s death five days later, most likely from heat exhaustion.

“I learned that in some places, they had to open the gates of Puerto Rico’s Guajataca Dam and didn’t really notify the persons living around the dam,” she says. “The area was flooded and complete families died. The government hasn’t said anything and didn’t pay attention to it.”